Illustrated headpiece with title for Thomas Hardy's "A Committeeman of 'The Terror'" by H. Burgess. Lithograph, rregular form, 18 cm high by 25.7 cm wide.
The Illustrated London News (November 1896): 3.
Scanned image, caption, and commentary by
Philip V. Allingham; html and
formatting
by George P. Landow. [You may use this
image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long
as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your
document to this URL.]

Late in the century, when The
Illustrated London News featured "A Committee-Man of 'The
Terror'" in its extra Christmas Number for 1896, lithographs had
generally displaced woodblocks for large-scale illustrations in
mass-market British periodicals. Such is unfortunately the case here.
Despite Burgess's logical selection for scenes, realistic costuming, and
firm sense of composition, the headpiece and three illustrations are
disappointing in their clarity and detail. Though economically
establishing in impressionist terms the crime of Monsieur B—
against Mademoiselle V— (the public execution of almost her entire
family during the French Revolution), the headpiece does not do justice
to the horror of the young woman's recollection. Although photographic
in its indistinctness, the initial illustration captures the mood of the
scene on the scaffold: dark clouds, suggestive of storm and conflagration,
complement the bold striations cutting diagonally across the picture and
swinging up towards the title. The mood of violent change thus evoked is
appropriate to the resuscitating of the era in which revolutionary currents
swept across Europe a century before the story's publication. The four figures
on the platform occupied by the guillotine are, the reader presumes, the
executioner (nearest the gruesome device) and Mademoiselle V—'s father,
brother, and uncle. However, if this whispy image in shades of grey is a
projection of her faded memory of the event, as is suggested by her remarking
to the Committee-Man "I saw you in years gone by, when you did not see me" (5),
then the fourth figure might be taken as Monsieur B— himself,
since she accuses him of having "guillotined my father, my brother, my
uncle" (5), rather than merely having consigned her immediate male
relatives to liquidation. As opposed to the almost photographic reality
of the succeeding lithographs, the blurry headpiece is difficult to
"read," except as an outline or precise of the event that involved the
story's principals ten years earlier. Burgess, the illustrator, would
perhaps have justified the blurriness as implying the nature of
Mademoiselle V—'s repressed memory of that traumatic and
life-changing event.

References

Brady, Kristin. The Short Stories of
Thomas Hardy. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982.